It’s being called the “copyright Armageddon,” a looming legal battle between manufacturers and the Internet, thanks to the increasing popularity of 3D printers. With some desktop units available for as little as $500, almost anyone can now print plastic items from the comfort of home—tools and toys, house decorations, even musical instruments. The possibilities seem limitless—and so, too, does the potential for piracy.

Internet piracy has been an issue ever since Shawn Fanning created the music file-sharing program Napster. Though Napster was shut down in 2001, after one of the biggest copyright battles in history, piracy has only spread, from music to movies and books. But until recently, online theft has been limited to data, not physical objects.

Now some file-sharing websites are taking advantage of what many expect to be the next digital revolution. Popular music and video downloading website the Pirate Bay has rolled out a database for 3D downloads. The 3D printers, which are about the size of a microwave, read the files—essentially a digital blueprint—and lay down thin layers of plastic from the bottom up to build objects. There are files that claim to print everything from a working “Nerf gun” to an iPod dock.

Some companies are already taking legal action. Games Workshop, the maker of popular toy figurines, filed cease and desist notices in June against the 3D download website Thingiverse for posting files for some of its models. While a flood of lawsuits seems inevitable, some experts warn that corporations have a tough fight on their hands. “It’s difficult when it comes to copyright because it’s not like it is with music or movies—physical objects don’t have the same level of protection,” says Michael Weinberg, a lawyer for the Internet advocacy group Public Knowledge. Weinberg notes that while some designs might have patent or copyright protection, it is difficult for companies to claim a monopoly on the production of functional objects, meaning a company that makes tools would have a hard time bringing a successful suit against someone who prints a 3D hammer or wrench.

Not all brand items are necessarily protected, either. “Lego has some patents and some copyrights on designs, but the object itself doesn’t really have any protection,” says Weinberg. The last Lego block patent expired in 1989. The test will be how companies like Lego address 3D printed designs. “Lego can go after them as pirates or it can embrace them as big fans. We haven’t seen Lego running around suing people yet,” says Weinberg. But Lego has been aggressive in defending its products in the past, with mixed success. In 2003, Lego won a lawsuit in Norway against a company for capitalizing on brand confusion to sell building blocks. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed a Lego suit against its archrival Mega Brands.

Some argue that the responsibility for stopping illegal activity may lie with 3D printer manufacturers. Intellectual Ventures, a U.S. patent company, owns a patent for a 3D printing protection system that functions in a similar fashion to the digital rights management (DRM) systems that have emerged in the music industry—basically a way for printers to acknowledge that an object has been legally downloaded before printing. The company is quick to point out that there is no legal requirement for this technology.

The big fear within the 3D printing industry is that governments will step in with laws limiting the use of the technology. In the U.S., a 2011 Atlantic Council report floated the idea of creating a law similar to the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act that would allow copyright holders to demand files be removed due to infringement.

Groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation hope that companies will choose to adapt to the new technology rather than spend millions fighting it. Manufacturers, for instance, could offer to sell 3D files through an official store, much like songs sold on iTunes. That, however, could have a dire effect on retailers. “As more organizations and individuals become manufacturers, the lines between manufacturer and customer will blur. When there is a retailer in between, those lines will blur too. Manufacturing will become retailing,” wrote the tech consulting firm CSC in a report last year on the future of 3D printing.

Any open embrace of 3D printing seems unlikely. It was nearly five years between Napster and the opening of iTunes stores across all platforms—a period that allowed illegal downloading to establish a firm toehold in the market. Like the music and film industries before them, manufacturers seem destined to slug it out in the courts, and history suggests it’s not going to be pretty.

Is the Lady a mere copycat?
In its way, Lady Gaga’s tireless hunt for ways to shock us is nothing if not ambitious. Last week, it was her pals at PETA who were outraged after she appeared on Vogue Japan’s cover wearing only slabs of meat. Her Warholian shtick is now under fire as not being as original as we think. Yana Morgana claims Gaga stole her late daughter Lina’s flair for theatrics after the two recorded a dozen songs together in 2008. “Every other word she says is from Lina,” she told the New York Post.

Painting the town whiteFrançois Croteau, the mayor of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, Que., hopes to cool his corner of Earth one white roof at a time. He’s proposed a bylaw making white roofs mandatory on all new buildings in the Montreal borough so they generate less heat. Roofs under repair would also have to be painted white, though residential peaked roofs are exempt. The plan is endorsed by Concordia University engineering professor Hashem Akbari, who is campaigning to get 100 of the world’s largest cities to go white. Changing all the roofs in the world would be equal to parking the world’s cars for 20 years, he says. Councillors vote in October.

Newspapers: the next big thingPrince, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, is having a boffo summer since he famously declared the Internet “completely over”—as “outdated” as MTV. He’s playing last-minute stadium shows and occasional small gigs, maintaining his reputation as a musical rebel. He gave away for free his new CD, 20TEN, in four European newspapers, including London’s Mirror. Fed up with Internet abuses, he’s banned YouTube and iTunes from using his songs. “I really believe in finding new ways to distribute my music,” he told the Mirror, which, incidentally, was founded in 1903.

The First Lady of DanceMichelle Obama has added student dance to her list of causes. The U.S. first lady opened the storied East Room, the site of many a presidential press conference, to a new kind of White House spin. Or, more accurately, pirouettes and jetés. Students from around the U.S. have a chance to work with the best in the business, including members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. At the end of the session Obama, who watched the event with her mother, Marian Robinson, and daughters Sasha and Malia, told the young dancers: “If you’ve done it in the White House, you can do it anywhere!”

Demerit points for creativity
Los Angeles Lakers forward Ron Artest’s status as a playoff hero didn’t prevent him from being ticketed by a city cop for a driving infraction, but, darn, he looked good committing it. Artest was pulled over driving what looked like an Indy racer that strayed from the track. In fact, it’s an Eagle Roadster, a custom beauty with a top speed of 245 km/h. Gossip site TMZ posted a photo of a smiling Artest in his racer chatting up the officer, a full-face helmet tipped back on his head. It seems his only sin was a faulty registration. As he later tweeted: “not speeding the car looks illegal it’s legal.”

Bacteria buy two tickets to Sweden
Polystyrene cups and packaging not only clog landfills, they foul waterways. That’s the problem, and Quebec City students Alexandre Allard and Danny Luong appear to have found a solution. The 19-year-olds won the 2010 Stockholm Junior Water Prize for developing a technique to break down the foam plastic. When they learned the foam releases toxins in the ocean, Allard told the CBC from Stockholm, “this gave us the idea that maybe polystyrene biodegraded.” A search of the local dump in Cap-Rouge yielded three strains of bacteria that turn the troublesome foam into carbon dioxide. Their efforts earned them the US$5,000 prize, presented by Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden.

George Pimentel/GETTY IMAGES

On the seventh day, he made a doc
So far this fall, James Franco, 32, has inked a distribution deal for his directorial debut, Saturday Night, a documentary on the making of one Saturday Night Live episode. His star turn in 127 Hours, as real-life rock climber Aron Ralson, who cut off part of his arm to free himself from a boulder, was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. Howl, in which he plays beat poet Allen Ginsberg, opens on Sept. 24. And The Dangerous Book Four Boys, his solo mixed-media art show, continues its run at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. It’s a study of masculinity and sexuality, which he also explores onscreen as Julia Roberts’s young lover in Eat Pray Love. Then there’s a forthcoming collection of short stories, and his enrolment this fall in Yale’s English Ph.D. program while simultaneously attending the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, among other things.

Happiness is a butter fry
Fair season is under way, but already, crazed food scientists are at work on the next caloric atrocity. It will be tough to top deep-fried butter, this year’s surprise hit at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition and the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver. Award-winning fry-ist Abel Gonzales Jr. hatched the idea at the Texas state fair, where he holds trophies for deep-frying Coke and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. In Vancouver, Steve Parsons created a variation, mixing whipped butter, icing sugar and cream cheese into balls that are battered and plunged in boiling oil. Vicky Skinkle at the concession in Toronto keeps her recipe secret. David Bednar, general manger of the CNE, told the Toronto Star the “extraordinary” butter bombs may have fattened attendance.

Boy wonder
It would be the height of hubris for most anyone to claim he’s changed the world “at least three times,” but most people aren’t Sean Parker. He helped create Napster at 19, and was founding president of Facebook at 24. Now, at 30, the great innovator is the subject of a glowing profile in Vanity Fair, stuffed with tributes by everyone from Sean Lennon to Ashton Kutcher (“a genius, no question”). Parker’s smart enough to use the profile as a pre-emptive strike against The Social Network, a movie in which Justin Timberlake portrays him as a hard-partying greed-hog. “That [movie] character really isn’t me,” he told Timberlake.

World’s cutest speed bump
So far this school year seven-year-old Lauren Fisher has been run over hundreds of times in the name of safety. She’s the little girl used for a 3-D optical illusion of a child chasing a ball on the road outside École Pauline Johnson elementary in West Vancouver. The illusion is created by a photographic decal of her. It seems to rise from the road as motorists approach the school zone, jarring them into slowing down. Her mom, Shannon Fisher, said Lauren is proud of her role: “She kept saying, ‘We’re going to make people driver slower around schools.’ ”

When you’re yuan at heart
Zimbabwe’s VP thinks the country should adopt the Chinese yuan. The currency switch, says Joice Mujuru—long considered President Robert Mugabe’s heir apparent—would be a “natural progression,” given the Asian giant is Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partner. Most of what’s produced in the country, like tobacco and minerals, “is ultimately being bought by the Chinese,” the online newspaper Afrik News reported. The 54-year-old Mujuru has been in cabinet since the tender age of 25. She earned Mugabe’s admiration during the war of independence, when she took the name “bloodspiller,” and rose through guerrilla ranks to become one of its first female commanders.

Paper or pixel?
It’s only natural that Vancouver-based author William Gibson, wildly successful with his sci-fi works, looks beyond the present when it comes to the printed word. The e-book “doesn’t fill me with quite the degree of horror and sorrow that it seems to fill many of my friends,” he told the Wall Street Journal, while plugging his new novel Zero History. Printing books, transporting them, then pulping those unsold is environmentally “crazy,” he says. He foresees stores with in-house presses that can print and bind a book within minutes of purchase. “You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book—and it would be a real book.”

Fishing for compliments
All that stuff Flipper did on TV—saving lives, out-thinking bad guys—maybe it isn’t so far-fetched. Scientists watching the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia—including one they’ve named William the Concherer—conclude they’re highly innovative when it comes to filling their bellies. Sometimes they hydroplane into shallow water, chasing fish into the shallows. Or they use conch shells like a fishing net-cum-takeout container, trapping fish, then eating them. Simon Allen of the Cetacean Research Unit at Murdoch University told the BBC dolphins lift the shells to the surface, shaking them “to drain the water and the hapless fish into the waiting jaws of death.”

Honest, I’m laughing with you
Legendary photographer Cindy Sherman took some of the stuffing out of New York’s precious Fashion Night Out this month. Working with the label Balenciaga, she created a series of six images of herself dressed as the sort of hangers-on high fashion attracts. Sherman’s staged photos and fake movie stills—sometimes featuring her as a model, sometimes featuring dummies or dolls—have appeared everywhere from Artforum to MOMA in New York City. Each of the new ones—like “aging doyenne” and “best friends forever”—pose with the kind of frantic artificiality that is the staple of society pages. In all the less-than-flattering photos, she’s dressed in Balenciaga, a gutsy move by the fashion house, one paying off with favourable buzz.

For over 10 years, music piracy has been the recording industry’s bogeyman. But Jimmy Iovine, head of Interscope Records, has another beef with digital music: a lot of it “sounds like crap.” As labels scrambled to contain the threat posed by file-sharing services like Napster, they “did nothing about the disintegration of digital sound,” Iovine told Maclean’s from his home in L.A. With the proliferation of cheap earbuds, cellphone MP3 players, and tinny laptop speakers, we’ve lost the “emotion of the music,” he says—the range and richness of sound that artists intended us to hear, and in many cases, spent tens of thousands of dollars in studios creating. “Degrading content is just as severe as piracy,” he says. “I call it a digital revolution that went terribly wrong.”

Iovine is looking to “fix the entire ecosystem,” from headphones and sound files to computers. In 2008, he founded Beats Electronics with music producer Dr. Dre, and partnered with Monster Cable (a high-performance cable manufacturer) to launch Beats by Dr. Dre, a line of high-end headphones. Thanks to positive reviews and celebrity endorsements—Katie Holmes and the NBA’s LeBron James have been photographed with them—kids raised on MP3s were soon ditching their $10 earbuds. But there’s no sense paying up to $400 for headphones if they’re going to be plugged into a computer—which is how almost 90 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 listen to music, says Iovine. That’s why this week, Beats and Hewlett-Packard are launching the Envy 17, a notebook that comes with an in-built subwoofer.

Selling a computer for its sound system is a departure, since “laptops were never designed to reproduce music,” Monster’s Noel Lee told Maclean’s. “They were designed for word processing, spreadsheets, to answer your email.” And as they’ve gotten smaller and lighter, the quality of built-in speakers has suffered: a computer’s whirring and whistling insides can be hostile to sound. Trying to enjoy music on most computers, Iovine says, is like “taking a Beatles remaster and playing it through a portable television.”

Of course, audiophiles have been saying this for years; an array of headphones, speakers and other equipment already exists to get the most out of digital sound. (Richard Bowden of Toronto’s Bay Bloor Radio recommends Bose computer speakers.) Iovine, though, is looking for an answer that doesn’t sacrifice portability—and so entices young people. Last year, HP introduced its premium Envy notebooks (the newest models, including the Envy 17, are being launched this week). Creating the line “wasn’t just about upgrading the speakers and the amplifier; we looked at the entire architecture” of the computer, says Carlos Montalvo, a vice-president at HP. For one thing, the audio signal was completely isolated “from the source, all the way to line out.” To clear space for the built-in speakers, which are on opposite sides of the notebook, other components had to be minimized. Specially designed Beats Audio software lets users play with audio levels and settings. The digital signal processor was even tuned to mimic Dre’s in-studio sound, but the notebooks are not just for “urban music,” Montalvo says.

Tech sites have generally given the Envy models good reviews, while noting their flaws. CNET praised its slim body and powerful components, noting it’s “very expensive” (the Envy 15 sells for $2,200); as for the sound system, Beats Audio will “even make a pair of regular iPod earphones sound amazing,” said PC Magazine (the sound improves when connected to high-quality headphones or speakers). Still, it’s a challenge to squeeze so many bells and whistles into a laptop. The Envy 15’s palm rest got “uncomfortably hot,” Engadget wrote, “perhaps a result of the very thin design and performance parts.” Then there is the inevitably short battery life.

In overhauling digital music, computers and headphones are merely part of the solution. “Your listening system is only as good as your weakest link,” Iovine says. And most music is heard on the MP3 platform, says Sandy Pearlman, the famed producer behind such classics as Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) the Reaper, and a visiting professor at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. “This platform is promiscuous and gets music around for nothing, which is good and bad, but it doesn’t get it around sounding very good,” he says. MP3 files are compressed so we can pack thousands of songs onto a laptop or iPod and trade them online, but some of the information, and therefore sound quality, is lost.

The industry is looking to improve digital files: Apple is using Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) in its iTunes store and elsewhere, which has better sound quality. Even better is a lossless format like FLAC, which creates a much larger file but stores a CD track without losing information. But the key step is retraining a generation in how music is supposed to sound. “I have no doubt people want quality,” Iovine says. “They just don’t know.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/a-sweeter-sound/feed/12What’s the saving throw against a chaotic-evil digithief?http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/whats-the-saving-throw-against-a-chaotic-evil-digithief/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/whats-the-saving-throw-against-a-chaotic-evil-digithief/#commentsWed, 02 Dec 2009 09:31:42 +0000Colby Coshhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=95489Speaking on the first day of the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, Rupert Murdoch’s US leader accused the press of being the “principal architect of its greatest difficulty today”.…

Speaking on the first day of the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, Rupert Murdoch’s US leader accused the press of being the “principal architect of its greatest difficulty today”. …”We are allowing our journalism—billions of dollars worth of it every year—to leak onto the internet. We are surrendering our hard-earned rights to the search engines and aggregators, and the out and out thieves of the digital age.” [link]

There is something remarkable about this quote from Les Hinton that perhaps nobody has noticed. If the “and” in the last sentence is accurate, Hinton is not suggesting that search engines and news aggregators are thieves: he is specifically stating that they are NOT thieves, or not quite. This is an opinion that is the direct, 180-degree opposite from the one his boss has often expressed. Considering which boss we’re talking about, you never saw a bigger “and” in your life.

Hinton is right to speak carefully, of course. Theft is the taking of property without consent, but the big windmill Murdoch is tilting at, Google, still requires his implied permission as proprietor to engage in all that linking he so objects to. (To get the full effect, imagine that word “linking” spoken in a sneering, sulfurous Montgomery Burns voice. Linnnkinnng.) Blocking Google’s robots from crawling a website and scraping data for its main search engine takes about 30 seconds’ work. The process of having a site removed from Google News can be initiated in another 60, with a simple e-mail.

So what’s the holdup on Murdoch’s side? Obviously his wrath at “thieves” is properly understood as a negotiating stance, not an inflexible philosophical position. Newspapers have problems, but as far I can see or have seen, they can’t complain of very widespread intellectual-property takings of the sort that are arguably helping to kill the “music business” (i.e., an infestation of parasites whose interpolation between musicians and their audiences no longer offers any benefit). If only the poor record companies could have fought off Napster and its successors by changing one line in a robots.txt file!

In a recent episode of The Office, Jim and Pam pushed their disdain for annoying co-worker Andy aside to watch pirated movies with him on his laptop. Why the change of heart? He was the only one at work who knew how to download bootleg films.

Meanwhile, in the real world, people are discovering that pirating movies has never been easier. Thanks to faster download speeds and easy-to-use software, it’s getting to the point where your grandmother can download any DVD she wants, for free, in minutes. Which means Hollywood is about to run headfirst into the same forces that have already decimated the music industry.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studios lost US$2.3 billion worldwide as a result of Internet piracy in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. In 2008, U.S. DVD shipments slumped to a five-year low. Here in Canada, DVD sales are still climbing, but moviemakers say illegal downloading and streaming is posing an increasing threat. “It’s the most significant challenge for the industry,” says Wendy Noss, executive director of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association.

In an effort to keep pirating at bay, movie studios are attempting to offer video content in the format viewers desire—legally—through video-on-demand releases and Web extras on Blu-ray discs. As Eric Garland, the CEO of the online research company BigChampagne, recently told the New York Times, “that’s how you start to marginalize piracy—not just by using the stick, but by using the carrot.”

Still, according to Tim Blackmore, a media studies professor at the University of Western Ontario, for the industry to succeed, “the carrot has got to be a lot smarter and better”—especially in these recessionary times. After all, says Blackmore, it’s hard to resist getting a valuable product for free, and for the younger generation, pirating content doesn’t seem to pose an ethical quandary. In fact, he says, it can often be seen as a cool way to say “ ‘screw you’ to the man.”